Welcome to Junkie City, USA, a.k.a. Eureka, California. What is the attraction of this place to those who prefer life on a needle instead of working to find something akin to happiness? Oh, I know the answer is that those who’ve taken this path are suffering from deep pain inflicted upon them by those who have denied them love and betrayed the trust that should exist between family members. Well, that’s likely the most common cause, as why else would someone have so little self-confidence and self-loathing to try a little bit of suicide every day?

As for this small town of only about 27,000 people, it is beautiful and loaded with Victorian homes, so it’s certainly worth a visit.

Across from Old Town Eureka is Woodley Island, and behind that is Indian Island.

By 8:30, we were out on Clam Beach, walking north to the Little River State Beach.

There was a lot of ice out on the beach and even something called Frost Heave. When ice is forming below the surface and pushes up it can create some very strange soil extrusions. While I got a couple of photos of the phenomenon, I wasn’t happy enough with any one of them, so I give you a giant jellyfish, of which there were many on our oceanside walk.

I have no idea where this was, but it adds to the beauty of the day, so here it is.

This is on our way to Fern Canyon at the Prairie Creek Redwoods State Park and marks our second visit.

Yes, it’s still that cold out here.

Fern Canyon and our camera do not like each other. What a strange place this is with these vertical fern-covered canyon walls. We weren’t able to hike too far in as we weren’t wearing the right shoes for getting through the creek that runs through the canyon.

I’ve got a hunch that we’ll be bringing my mother-in-law Jutta up into this corner of America on her next visit.

About to leave Prairie Creek Redwoods State Park and head up to the Redwoods National Park.

Into the woods we go with god rays leading the way.

Big, thick bark on big old Redwood trees makes big old me happy.

The roads less traveled are the perfect trails for us to follow.

Has anyone ever seen all the redwoods that there are to see? How many people will attempt to hike the few remaining forests where these giants continue to exist in order to witness them firsthand before we lose our minds and finish the process of pushing them to extinction, which we were almost successful with?

How could we have ever been so merciless to just go after these forest dinosaurs and never consider anything other than the financial gain?

We take the energy of the sun while it smiles upon us, giving life. The symbiotic nature of it all is so easy to take for granted, as though reality is just this thing that happens and always has. I wish to know if, even for only a day, how the minds of early humans walked past this scene and interpreted the air visualized with the light of the sun that seemed to reach out to the observer.

Caroline is over there behind the door on the right. We are in O’Brien when we have a really great stupid idea.

How about we drive up to Grants Pass for a cup of coffee from Dutch Bros? But wait a second, don’t we have to be in Phoenix tomorrow? So, what’s your point?

If you think this “bath mat” is indicative of our $50 room at the Gold Star Motel in Sacramento, you wouldn’t be too far off. Good thing we only have 750 miles and about 11 hours of driving tomorrow otherwise, we’d probably have to remain on the road tonight beyond the already late hour of nearly 11:00 p.m. My apologies in advance if there are no photos posted tomorrow, as we’ll have to focus on driving.